Don’t Let Distress Become Your Destiny

18 years ago when I lived in Paris, I wrote the following poem called, “The Nightingale”.

The bubble burst and splashed itself all around and over me.

The bird was flying across the blue sky and a hunter shot it down.

The rose was blooming petal by petal and I plucked it and threw it into the fire.

I had a sip of water in a beautiful lake in a beautiful forest and stepped into a trap.

A bowl of milk was lying for me and a drop of black ink fell into it by chance.

The Gods were showering their blessing on me and I was looking for shelter.

The spirit in me was rising splendidly and I stepped on it with the weight of an elephant.

I was singing like a nightingale and someone pushed me off the branch in my sleep.

You could say there was distress in my life then, even trauma. It was a dark and dreadfully dreary time. My heart was heavy and the future looked bleak. Hope, love, joy, and peace were not easily accessible, to say the least.

At the time I wrote these words I truly believed that this would be how the rest of my life would go. That everything good in my life will always come to an end. There was no happy ending, no fairy tale in my life. There was all encompassing grief and isolation. That – this is it. This is the death of all the good things that I have ever dreamed of or desired for myself. You think you are almost going to die, and then you don’t. Something, however minuscule and small, clicks, ticks, and a tiny, sliver of a ray of light escapes and makes it through and if you notice, it guides you out of darkness.

I have been on a journey of healing, recovery, and transformation since 1992, that’s 25 years. These 25 years have had periods of darkness and those of light. Some times were happy, some were sad, and there were all the times in between when I was unconscious and didn’t know what to even feel. There were periods of numbness. There were periods of rage. There were times of romance, love, health, and wellness. And there were times of peak creativity, spirituality, and awakening.

We all have access to all these sorts of times in our life. It is called being ALIVE. Distress is a part of our lives, always, but does it have to become our destiny? The answer is a BIG, GIANT, RESOUNDING NO!!!

If you have read my book, “Coming Home to the Heart”, then you know that the path to recovery is a crooked one, but you walk it anyway. Because the alternative is being stuck in the midst of the maelstrom and mayhem of our story. We live and relive, play, replay, rewind the movies of our past and watch them over and over again in our minds. If my life story was a YouTube video, I would have a billion views right now with just one subscriber – me!

I have learned that what you go through in your life does not have the power to define the rest of your life. You have to decide, make another choice, or “Choose Again”, as The Course in Miracles says. Rather than focusing on past distress and replanting the old into each new day, “Choose Again”! Don’t let suffering turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leave the past where it belongs, in the past.

What you read above were the first two paragraphs of my poem, “The Nightingale”. I continued to then write the following:

But I will have my magic bubbles again.

The sky will take me in its arms again.

The rose will bloom yet again.

The forest invites me yet again.

No darkness can penetrate my light henceforth.

No shelter can protect me from the grace of divinity above.

The spirit that has to rise will rise,

The nightingale that has to sing will sing,

Whatever be the odds, the truth shall prevail,

And the world will watch!!

How did I go from the first two dark and dreary paragraphs to these hopeful, optimistic, almost unrealistically rosy words, given how I was just feeling a second ago? It sounds a lot like whacky talk, doesn’t it?

While these words might sound crazy to some, I have come to understand that there is an un-mess-able, un-corrupt-able, divine self in all of us. There is a CORE Essential Self within all of us that was never ever touched or tampered with regardless of what happened in our lives.

There is an invisible awakening, a profound shift that occurred for me between the 2nd and 3rd paragraph of this poem. To someone reading it at first, it might seem abrupt or weird. But this is the paradigm shift, the nonlinear, quantum leap of transformation. Healing is instantaneous if you allow it. It could happen right now, or take the rest of your life and then some. The simplest yet most annoying fact about this is that it’s a choice, and your responsibility to take it on. And as a member of this human race, you are free to choose or not choose. The question is, “What do you want?”.

So now, with fresh eyes, I ask you read the poem once again from beginning to end. Notice what you might remember from the imagery of the darkness. And then allow yourself to remember those parts of you that are waiting to be connected with. The part of you that is love, light, and peace. Welcome to your Essential Self. It is the only truth there is to you. The rest of it is an entertaining story.

The Nightingale

The bubble burst and splashed itself all around and over me.

The bird was flying across the blue sky and a hunter shot it down.

The rose was blooming petal by petal and I plucked it and threw it in the fire.

I had a sip of water in a beautiful lake in a beautiful forest and stepped into a trap.

A bowl of milk was lying for me and a drop of black ink fell into it by chance.

The Gods were showering their blessing on me and I was looking for shelter.

The spirit in me was rising splendidly and I stepped on it with the weight of an elephant.

I was singing like a nightingale and someone pushed me off the branch in my sleep.